Traveling for rock shows is a proud tradition for some of my fellow journeymen, and I've been known to do so in the past... so company was tight.
The show was at the Manhattan, so we parked nearby... then on PJ's recommendation went to a nearby Irish pub called Triangles for dinner. I had pretty good Curry and Chips... Howard had something called Irish Tea Break which was two enormous slabs of beef and pork resting A-frame style atop a mound of roasted mash potatoes all topped with curly fried onions. Zany.
There were two openers... a solo act (ex-Deadly Snakes member) from Toronto going by the name Nordic Nomadic unspooled some spacey Tim Buckleyesque guitar swoonings. Next was Wisconsinite band (also on Jagjaguwar) Bon Iver... a three piece, two guitars and drums who's stuff veered from slowcore jams to what TV on the Radio's sound might be had they grown up around tractors instead of fire hydrants.
Black Mountain came out and ripped through most of their new album... tossing in a couple of nuggets from the first... did a three song encore (no 16 minute epic as I had predicted) and then it was 1am and time to hit the road again.
All three bands put on great sets, but they were compromised by the less-than-stellar sound the bar provided. The Manhattan is a restaurant/bar built in what used to be the back end of a movie theatre... the architecture of which means the ceiling above the stage is between 30-40 feet high. It seems like all the low end of Black Mountain's guitars and bass were sucked up into the void or bounced around the room until it sounded more like a boom than a groove. Still they brought the rock.
The drive back was into the eye of a snowstorm that grew steadily from the time we left the Irving in Salisbury until we hit Gagetown... at which point it was like having a drunk Santa pull you too close into his beard.
These are the little footprints I made coming home at around 4:30pm.
Ah rock and roll lifestyle... so glam.
Tonight:
No comments:
Post a Comment